Yahoo didn't buy the technology, they purchased the talent. Talent that knows how to reach an audience. You can always get high quality engineers to figure out the rest...
The article's main point is that the founders didn't do anything really noteworthy, technologically speaking, and so Yahoo overpaid for the talent in question.
A million downloads of a free app is not really that noteworthy. My friend made a simple, free iPhone game in a weekend where you tap on a soccer ball and keep it from dropping and routinely gets 10s of thousands of downloads a month with absolutely no marketing.
I have some rather strong misgivings when purchased talent != high quality engineers where software product/company acquisitions are concerned.
There are some excellent professionals out there with a far more rigorously proven and solid track record of knowing how to reach an audience. You're suggesting the 17-yr-old & 2 compatriots have proven themselves to possess $30-million-worth of reaching-an-audience skill?
Which is why this acquisition was more about PR than talent or technology. It says (or tries to say), "You might think we're just dusty old Yahoo!, but we're hiring 17-year-old wunderkind too! We're hip to the next big thing! And remember we have a new CEO..."
"Summly's entire business model seems to revolve around catering to this demographic. Frankly, it pains me."
I reads like a critique of Chubby Checker's "Twist" from a professor a Julliard. Perhaps, and I say that because I can't know what they were really thinking, but perhaps that was the point. This company had successfully "catered to this demographic" (which was defined as young hipster like brogrammers) and while those guys drink their PBR and deck out their mancaves perhaps it is a demographic that Yahoo desperately wants to reach? Maybe the whole point was that Yahoo folks were building things for middle-aged dot boomers and not for the cool kids.
Maybe the goal was to get more people who could quickly assemble a MVP from existing APIs that appealed to the emerging cohort of buyers and trendsetters. Maybe NLP wasn't the point.
Well, I'm not finding a lot inherently wrong with using new and existing apis to make other things. I would in fact argue that that is why we create apis.
However, I feel like people aren't very upfront with the fact that they are building on top of APIs. For whatever reason, there's this perception that arranging existing resources into a more valuable arrangement is somehow not a valid approach.
I've got to say that people who can quickly assemble appealing MVPs from existing markets are exactly the sort of people Yahoo need, but the reported purchasing figures is a hefty price to pay for three staff, especially if all the available evidence points to them being productive startup generalists rather than visionary corporate project managers
Imagine how many MVPs Yahoo's existing staff could create if allocated $30 million of development time for skunkworks projects...
>Maybe the goal was to get more people who could quickly assemble a MVP from existing APIs that appealed to the emerging cohort of buyers and trendsetters.
There is a lot to be said for building the right thing; but the actual ability to assemble such products are very common and even the very premium skills are definitely for sale at market rates much lower than $15MM per year.
The skills are common here, not in general, and $15MM (total, not per year) is a cost of purchasing the assembled infrastructure, not the idea and potential to build. I don't think this is a wise expenditure, but you're attacking it from a poor angle.
From his own quoted post:
"I lived through 8 years of a non-reading president along with everyone else. I know that the brogrammers out there are constantly getting texts from their buddies to plan the weekend's broactivities..."
Thanks Professor, now I don't have to continue reading your post – ie, you're kind of a jerk.
Do you know which president I had in mind? I lived through quite a few 8 year terms, and yes, that includes Reagan.
If your response is "but everyone knows which president you were referring to," then surely it's fair game to refer to whoever that is since the facts are universally accepted? :-)
The comment thread is only just getting started and there are already two comments about why they didn't bother reading. The TL;DR generation has another skill - finding ways to rationalize why they didn't tax their brains with the effort of reading. Mostly they're of the format "I read x in the first few lines so it disqualified the rest of the article from further attention".
I think there's a new qualification for TL;DR - DFIAT - didn't fit in a tweet.
Dang, I been tricked!
Seriously, though, it's not in our nature to take counsel from folks who act disrespectfully. The quip about a non-reading president and "brogrammers" fits that.
So much of what goes on in transactions in Silicon Valley has little to do with the headlines and a lot to do with power brokers and their interests.
It's a shame we don't have investigative journalism in Silicon Valley any more - partly because it's out of vogue nationally, and partly because Silicon Valley journalists love to hob-nob with investors. I'd love to see a follow-the-money on this deal.
Fantastic mini example of the point the author makes about TLDR's
I started reading your comment (first 9 words), nearly stopped reading it thinking "they don't get it," carried on for some reason and 5 words later it showed that I agreed with you completely!
Overpaying for apps is the new overpaying for social networks for that vague master bullshit artistry of "reaching" users.
Yahoo irrationally overpays for tons of stuff, AOL irrationally overpaid for Bebo, there was that high school girl that made a social network and makes millions of dollars so she bought her mom a house, there are plenty of other data points I filed away in my head over the years.
Tons of things happen in Silicon Valley everyday that makes no sense to outsiders, or sometimes even to those stuck in the tunnel. Are you new here? Sit, enjoy a cup of tea meanwhile.
Throw on top of that the youth obsession in tech has been around since I was 17 eleven years ago and it will continue to stay. Youth is forever a distraction that you have to grow out of. If you don't then consider seeking a therapist.
Your brain hurts from trying to neatly organize this particular liquidity event as fair? Maybe you can't. Maybe it doesn't matter. Get over it, stop the hating, and get back to work.
Funny enough, mainstream media with old talking heads are spinning this narrative two ways: 1) the ever louder need to get every child to learn to code and 2) it's so fun bit of escapism to think what you would have done with big money when you're still a teenager contrasted against the $325MM Powerball win in New York.
All in all, this barely registers as a blip on the average American considering real shit that's ongoing with fairness over marriage equality in SCOTUS.
I've been saying this for the last three years here on Hn: Yahoo is stupid to not be aggressively and heavily spending their massive cash reserves to buy back into an innovative place here in the valley.
Mayer is no dope! She knows that being the convoluted portal that Yahoo is, is a death sentence. They need to act quick and fast and often.
Buying up a very young tech upstart is a good step toward splicing in some new, nimble DNA - which Yahoo needs desperately.
$30MM is also a marketing number!
Remember when everyone's exit plan was Google or Facebook? Well, add Yahoo to the list for exit acquire players.
Exactly. Yahoo tried the "buy our way into being innovative" when they went on their Web 2.0 spending spree, picking up Delicious, Flickr and Upcoming. They systematically choked each one to death because the corporate structure/culture didn't support buying in companies that way (see EA for the same thing in games).
Marissa Mayer may be able to stave that off this time around and Yahoo may be able to buy their way into mobile, but when mobile is so hit-driven and short-term, it seems unwise to start spending money on little things like silly TL;DR apps (that you're going to shut down, anyway).
If the deal is about pushing into mobile, Yahoo needs to secure culture changers, not apps. They need to buy the Duartes and Rubensteins and Brichters, and give them full autonomy to run the mobile ship however they please. That's a longer term plan, but it pays off in actual tangible results. $100 says we never hear anything about Summly's technology again, and the kid leaves as soon as his stock vests.
Yes, I am familiar with Yahoo's history as well - and clearly their leadership in the past was simply not qualified to buy their way to innovation - as they didn't come from an innovated place.
Yahoo is a web 1.0 company, pre-crash and just didn't have it in their DNA to innovate out - like you said, they choked those previous acquisitions to death.
That doesn't mean that the strategy of acquiring their way back to a good position is bad - it was that the leaders previously attempting to do so just didn't have it in them.
They have to, as they are way behind in mobile and nobody good wants to work there.
Sumly is three people and they paid about $30 million for it. Start throwing million dollar /year offers and many "good" programmers will want to work there. This stinks, IMO.
I'd agree they're overpaying because they're behind, but let's not simplify this too much. They did not pay $30m to 3 people in exchange for them 3 people working with them.
Yahoo! paid $30 mil and, in exchange, got 3 people working for them. Not all the money made its way into those people's hands, but from Y!'s perspective I think the summary is fair.
> Your brain hurts from trying to neatly organize this particular liquidity event as fair?
Like much of the commentary in the other story, you're projecting. The article is a discussion of why this deal is stupid, not bellyaching about it being unfair.
This is my (pessimistic) take on this Summly thing. I think the following scenario happened:
15 year old kid does something with computers and for some reason the press is all over it. Some smart investors thinks; "hey, I can use this to make money". They invest money into this 15 year old which gives him more press coverage. Wait a few years and the investor gets his buddies at Yahoo to buy it for a substantial amount of money. Ka-ching, money in the bank.
You usually don't get to be a billionaire without spending a lot of time in the office and working pretty hard. To give some apropos examples: Marissa Mayer is reportedly going over every Yahoo hire; _In The Plex_ mentions Page doing the same thing at Google.
"Police had to step in to keep order among investors queuing to buy shares as the internet gold rush swept dramatically into Hong Kong.
A crowd of about 30,000 people formed outside one of the few banks where small investors could apply for shares in internet firm tom.com.
...
Thousands of investors pushed and shoved through queues stretching back as far as half a mile to hand in their forms at the worst hit HSBC branch in Kowloon.
Analysts have predicted that the Hong Kong firm's share sale will prove to have been a record 2,000 times over-subscribed."
If this is true, imagine what it's like to be a Yahoo engineer. You just lost the ability to telecommute. You've suffered through downsizing. Morale is (by all reports) completely in the tank, and now they dump $30M into a 17 year old?
Summly had tons of investors, who put in a grand total of $1.5 million. If they needed to be bailed out of that, they shouldn't have been investing in the first place.
> By definition, Yahoo's directors know how to spend Yahoo's cash reserves best.
This is absolutely incorrect. There are many instances in which there is a personal financial connection between a board member and an acquired company. For example, a board member is a limited in a VC fund.
Ironic. The post says: "But it's really not ok to act functionally illiterate when you're not actually illiterate, when an advanced society that once put a man on the moon worked so hard to educate you."
If you'd read the text more carefully you wouldn't have missed the sarcasm of the passage you were so quick to dismiss. He was being sarcastic!
I didn't see any sarcasm about that; through the rest of the essay he seemed to continue to take at face value that Yahoo's management is doing what they think right for Yahoo. The summly acquisition being some sort of self-dealing fraud would contradict his entire point.
I think you're supposed to have read irony into that comment. If you had bothered reading after that you would have seen that. That and the author's critique of people who can't be bothered reading more than a few paragraphs - in your case presumably because your default assumption is that you must know more than the author of the article and that he cannot possibly have been making a sophisticated point that would take more than that single sentence to unpack.
By definition, even if you include your statement, Yahoo directors know how to spend Yahoo's cash reserves best. It may be for their own best interest, but your statement doesn't contradict the OP's.
You get more points than the informative posts because you are the glue - the viscous, translucent glue that makes the Hacker News comment pages always stick together into a big, messy ball of self-satisfied cluelessness.
What's actually right about Yahoo's purchase of Summly: we are still talking about it, and are still reminded that Yahoo exists. The marketing was great (the video is really well-done), and to be honest yahoo really could use some marketing boost at a time like this.
I'm reminded Yahoo exists every time I check my false-negatives spam filter training file. Virtually all spam which gets through to my inbox is from Yahoo addresses, often from compromised actual people I need to receive mail from (including at least one partner at a fund, my dentist, etc.)
Ouch. Still, hard to find fault with the analysis, no matter how unpopular it may be with much of the readership of HN. Many folks here would love to sell a company to Yahoo! for $30MM after 18mo with minimal engineering effort and download numbers probably below those of many folks reading the news on HN.
We should all be very happy. This is a sign that easy money is still out there for the clever individual. I applaud the kid for what he has done. Yahoo might be stupid, but we've known that for a long long time.
I hear what you're saying, but the problem with poor deals like this which are done for reasons other than the headline reason, is that they're effectively random. You cannot structure your business in order to get an exit like this. You tend to luck into one - or more often you get it because you have a network of unpublicized connections who have interests that are not overtly clear. The rest of us? We should be happy when money is going to solid, well-built businesses with metrics we can all understand rewarding us for hard work and innovation - because unless you're already an insider, that's the only thing you can control to get a win.
I dont understand why the current wave of criticism is leaving the market penetration (and 1st mover advantage), brand, and million users (and climbing) out of the picture - like it's not important. And are assuming that Yahoo must of paid it all to hire 3 people.
Uh, the end result is that Yahoo paid for all of it to hire 3 people.
The app has been pulled from the app store( http://summly.tumblr.com/post/46247554262/yahoo-agrees-to-ac... ), and it does not sound like it's going to be back. Which is a disappointment, because I wanted to know exactly what the heck the app is, since I've never heard of it before.
So Yahoo's dropped any market penetration, the entire brand, and the million users. For 3 engineers and a few software API licenses.
The point is to dig up something cool in the vast universe of information and actually deliver it. It is nice there are friends and university Professors who knows about this certain technology way deeper but can they _really_ deliver ? Sure, they will teach other kids and those kids will teach others or maybe going to be employed at some tech company.
This kind of success is just more potent a visible. It really depends from what angle you look.
This guy has financial, educational and social success. From standpoint of the startup culture, I think he's done very well. Anything can be judged only by comparison to something else.
A common motivation for acquisitions is to buy users, not technology. YouTube used PHP and the video tech in flash - but they were the ones to grow the userbase (and continue to do so). If Summly had the product/marketing to be popular and growing, that's why Yahoo bought it. (though it seems Summly doesn't have the strong network-effects of YouTube, of gaining both producers and consumers).
EDIT they could be buying market-product fit...? but yes, if they killed it... hmmm...
Considering that yahoo immediately killed the product, and that its 1mill total users read 90mill summaries in ~18 months (that's less then 1 a day) I'd say they aren't buying users.
To the author: Would you have not taken a buyout offer from Yahoo! if you were in this kids position? All HN discussions regarding this topic have just screamed jealousy/disdain. It is as if people come to HN to read an intelligent argument to argue for their immature feelings. Also, the most important premise in your argument, that their technology was licensed, is incorrect. Their natural language technology was 100% proprietary according to them, and not "licensed from SRI" [0].
To truely understand what's going on here you have to follow the money. All of the money.
This is not a simple story of a hard working smart kid winning the tech lottery with a hot app/technology going from rags to riches. This is an arranged marriage, a PR stunt and a good-ole-boy deal all rolled into one. It's a VC fuck-you to all people that truly have innovative ideas, viable businesses, and dedicated employees that are trying to get management to notice solutions instead of golfing with "consultants" or blowing big money on solutions that could be built in-house for 1% of the costs.
The kid was born on third base, got home on a wild pitch and some folks think he hit a home run.
I wonder if Yahoo has got the rights to make a movie about this fairy tale. That's about the only way I can think of for them to cash-in. But it seems more likely that they just got sucker-punched.
So, what is Yahoo signaling to the world? "We value glue more than thought."
What? No it doesn't signal that at all. Look at Yahoo's other recent acquisitions. Yahoo is buying mobile app companies. Spinning it as technology vs glue is silly. It's all about buying expertise in mobile.
It doesn't seem to matter what the app does or how its built.
The story goes something like (a) people (yahoo) want mobile apps (b) the kid got investors to give him cash (c) people downloaded it generating 'buzz' (d) more investors and cash (e) more downloads and publicity (f) yahoo plays right into the hands of the investors and the hype around a young founder (g) yahoo buys the company, making the kid a millionaire, it's a PR grand slam, bringing more publicity and 'users' to the app (for now)
It works out really, really well for the investors and founder; in my opinion it seems like Yahoo got duped.
"But it's critical to keep tabs on the ratio known as 'glue versus thought.' Sure, both imply progress and both are necessary. But the former is eminently mundane, replaceable, and outsource-able. The latter is typically what gives a company its edge, what is generally regarded as a competitive advantage."
I am in finance. I am glue. I take existing people, things (read: capital), and ideas and bolt them together. Glue is the socioeconomic fabric that gives value to ideas, things, and ultimately people.
It's not just finance. Craigslist? Airbnb? Facebook? Apple? Glue. Put it this way: if you walked out the door with their source code, how much of their value could you replicate? Put it another way: how much would you pay to walk out the door with their source code and physical assets? Put it another way: how much would you pay to walk out the door with their source code, physical assets, and low to mid-level developers but none of their senior guys?
We have laws to protect intellectual property because thoughts and technologies are copyable, fungible, and ultimately outsource-able. We don't need such laws to protect relationships, the gluiest of glues. In fact, we need laws to break down their strength.
The people that connect people, things (i.e. capital), and ideas are not naturally less valuable than the people that come up with ideas or who have things. If you have someone who is able to whip together existing technologies into something that's tractable they very well can be more valuable than someone who invents new technologies all day. There is more information needed beyond "that's glue, it's worthless".
> The people that connect people, things (i.e. capital), and ideas are not naturally less valuable than the people that come up with ideas or who have things
I don't think anyone would argue that glue is naturally less valuable. The problem is that our current economic structure treats glue as if it creates approximately ALL of the value because we haven't figured out a good way to split value between different stages of the pipeline (IP isn't a good way).
Over-investing in glue is bad insofar as it comes at the expense of investing in fundamental technologies/research. Since our (over)valuation of glue currently places a rather heavy opportunity cost on performing said research and endorses the "academia is a waste" attitude, I tend to agree that our economy is too focused on glue.
> It's not just finance. Craigslist? Airbnb? Facebook? Apple? Glue. Put it this way: if you walked out the door with their source code tomorrow, how much of their value could you replicate?
You are conflating the "thought vs. glue" ratio with the "past thought vs. currently generating thought" ratio.
"You are conflating the 'thought vs. glue' ratio with the 'past thought vs. currently generating thought' ratio."
Glue takes thought, so the dichotomy is a bit rickety out of the door. I'm taking it as network value versus technical value. Both take present thought.
In terms of the first three, a lot of the value is in what economists call "positive network externalities", or "network effects".
If you walked out the door of Apple with source code and "source code" for their hardware, you could replicate a lot of their value for the immediate future, until they had time to cook up new stuff.
"If you walked out the door of Apple with source code and "source code" for their hardware, you could replicate a lot of their value for the immediate future, until they had time to cook up new stuff."
You are correct in that more of Facebook or Craigslist's values are comprised by network effects, but I still believe more of Apple is network effect than not.
Consider the walking-out-of-the-door-with-the-blueprints hypothetical. You would still need to cobble together a supply chain, i.e. glue together a string of "doers" and make sure the glue is strong enough so the whole thing doesn't fly apart like a 787.
Remember the Hacker News refrain about execution versus MBA-style "ideation"? The execution guys are valuable because they know where to find what and whom, not because they ninja together the eleventh hour code themselves.
> Consider the walking-out-of-the-door-with-the-blueprints hypothetical. You would still need to cobble together a supply chain, i.e. glue together a string of "doers" and make sure the glue is strong enough so the whole thing doesn't fly apart like a 787.
Maybe a more interesting hypothetical is "what could the 2nd place competitor do if they got blueprints and source code, and could use it freely?". In terms of Facebook and Craigslist, nothing much. In terms of Apple, Samsung could probably go to town with it, although I suppose you could also argue that "the right to use it freely" is in some ways the most important bit, as Samsung can probably replicate the hardware, and has good enough software at this point.
I think that his point is that glue is only as valuable as the product in which it's used.
In the case of finance, it's the fact that they operate as the middleman, getting money from one place to another. The product isn't just getting people together, it's providing a smooth way to move money around.
The other examples have a product where individual technologies were melded together to produce that specific product. They did much more than just take a few technologies, then bolt them together.
On the other hand, Summly seems like the technology should be the product. NLP is a very hot research topic, and when I first saw that the product went for $30 mil, I thought that they had some brand new NLP technique or algorithm that Yahoo was snapping up. In fact, several articles, like this NY Times article(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/business/media/nick-dalois... ) supported that view.
However, the truth is that they just took a pre-existing tech, and bolted it onto an iOS application. I can't comment about the app, since it's been pulled from the iOS store, but it does sound like they attempted to do something new with the interface, but that's about it. So Yahoo basically bought 2 engineers and a Siri NLP engine license, the later of which will undoubtedly become more expensive when the contract is renegotiated.
I'm commenting less on Summly and more on the general case. People who bolt together existing tech into something people want are extremely valuable. They have identified demand and found a way to address it using off-the-shelf components. The risk, often, is that someone else can just as easily bolt together the same components. This risk is mitigated by locking in the demand source, e.g. through brand recognition from your first-mover position. Someone able to rapidly bolt together a product that they subsequently ensconce with piercing marketing or another form of customer lock-in is a gold mine.
I really like this reply. I was both in finance and technology and there is a degree of glue and thought in both. However, in this case it's about the false perception that was created to the outsiders about Summly's level of innovation.
Interestingly, $30 million for the license is probably relatively cheap. I imagine that had Yahoo licensed it directly, that they'd be paying a lot more for it.
If you are glue, there is a terrible problem. When you are in finance you should be in the "Thought". You should think on who can pay the bills and who can not, so you could give loans to them or not.
You should be on thinking what is going to be the future and the business strategies that makes sense, business that are sound and solid versus scams to get people's money.
The fact that you consider yourself glue is the main problem. We are in a society when finance means "too big to fail", "we make bad decisions but do not pay for it", and "if people can not pay back its loans(because we lended irresponsibly) , we have to lower the requirements for loans even more".
I don't think is the right way to think about things. How much sense does Instagram make in 2010? How much sense did Twitter make in 2006? How much sense did Amazon make after the dotcom crash? No one has perfect information, and "business that are sound and solid" aren't the ones that need loans. Sound and solid businesses don't need help from finance guys.
I think the point of the OP is not that glue is not an essential part of a product. It is that when you start making things exclusively out of glue, then the all "glue and thought" ultimately worthless.
And most of us are, indeed, jelly. The bottom line is, if you're into start-ups, you understand that in many ways it's a lottery. Instagram won last week, then Pinterest, and now Summly. This is the norm. Over-paying for products that aren't really even products.
I'm surprised a professor at Cornell hasn't understood the VC culture yet. I was talking to a friend last week about this cute chick he wanted to introduce me to. Turns out she works at a relatively famous startup in L.A. as a secretary. It also turns out that she makes more than my mom (who's a research chemist). I've just learned to /sigh, move on and then quickly get back to work.
Throwing money around is how Silicon Valley works. Get used to it.
As a fellow 17-year-old, I have nothing less than respect for Nick. You're obviously doing something right if you sell your company for $30M before you're an adult. Who cares if he's not an AI researcher? The scholar who wrote this article can't bash this kid's product until he actually builds something useful. If he came up with a revolutionary AI theory, great. But the people who take an experimental idea and see the value in it are the people who change the world. Einstein came up with some good theories, but nobody will remember his name when someone uses the theories to create a time machine.
Are we going to ridicule Tesla Motors for making (highly innovative) cars because they licensed the steering wheel or navigation system from another company?
I should have known better about the age thing. I know it's a stretch to compare the two, but Summly seems more innovative than "a unique new social network" if you know what I mean. I give the kid tons of credit.
The fact is that technology is in almost every facet of the world. However we view Yahoo!, they must know that technology is foundational relationship to cultivate and enhance.
idk, their core asset may not be their technologies. Their asset maybe the ad space they sell and the properteis they own. I think of Yahoo in as in the buisness of owning things so they can sell adds. I don't think they care about the technology of this app (which is less then a masters thesis) compared to its user base.
Certainly I know some people of U of I who worked on it, but Hadoop isn't developed for a Yahoo user. It is used mainly for serving ads and doing market analysis. A normal Yahoo user reads their mail and the sports page. Google makes its bread by facilitating advertizements on other peoples websites - it provides these kinds of technologies to other people. How they put up advertizements is their choice. Google's clients are responsible for content. Yahoo is more about providing media, they happen to make revenue with their own internal advertizements.
Google's primarily goal isn't to own every computer screen, they just hope that their ads make it to every screen. Yahoo's goal is to fill every screen. For Yahoo buying screen space is a end in itself.
For the record: not Oakleys, not at a beach, but yes, looking to the side.
If we're done picking on looks and personal issues, something I tried to avoid very carefully in the article, perhaps we can focus on content and ideas?
I think looks and activities is inextricable with "bro"-ness. You're not slaying the LES bar circuit unless you have a certain look along with a certain behavior and attitude.
I feel sad for anyone that has to experience an interview session with you, if such an event happens, because you clearly have no issue with guessing a person's life and behavior from one small photo that you are seeing out of context. Even though the person in question stated that you are in fact wrong in almost every way of what you think you see in the picture. In fact, I'm sensing a small bit of projection in this because your statements make no real sense at this point, so you appear to be lashing out at a stranger for no apparent reason. Perhaps jealousy?
Please post a small photo of you in a somewhat generic setting that I don't know the story behind so that I too can play the game of guessing a person's life experiences and attitude based on that one small example.
What this really underscores is that conventional capitalism provides little incentive for fundamental innovation.
All this stuff we're gluing together is the product of state-funded research, mostly from the cold war era. DARPANet, the web (CERN), DARPA research on "augmented human intelligence," etc.
(I bet you thought Xerox PARC invented that stuff, right? Or Apple? Nope. DARPA and SRI invented the entire modern user experience in the 1960s.)
Few companies ever fund that kind of thing. There's two reasons. One is risk vs. reward-- such projects are typically "high risk, high payoff" as DARPA likes to say. Most lead nowhere. The second reason is that there is no good mechanism for monetizing the result. Fundamental innovations are often too fundamental to patent effectively, and are easy to copy once understood. They're also often worthless in themselves. They are enablers of value that is built on top of them.
Fundamental innovation is a lot like infrastructure -- something else free market players seldom invest in.
This is a problem for today's generation of enthusiastic free-market proponents. Who is going to pay for the next generation of innovation?
It's also very unjust. Where were Douglas Engelbart's billions? Tim Berners-Lee, is he a billionaire? No, we have 17 year olds making quick millions gluing together the work of dozens of Ph.D's who will never see that kind of money in their lifetimes.
It's a big thing that turned me off the Ph.D path. I don't feel like taking a vow of poverty and toiling in the dungeons to develop some fundamental, difficult concept that someone else then takes, glues to something else, flips, and gets rich.
When I was about to start my PhD, a professor and good friend of mine (who already had one) told me: "The people who finish a PhD are not the most intelligent, but the most perseverant".
Some people don't live their lives to interact with high-power investors, but contribute vastly more value to society than people who do live their lives to do so.
Most of the people who don't succeed financially made a terrible choice of who there parents were. It's probably the single most important choice one can make.
that's not really fair to the kid. All of us are born with advantages that others lack.
Every person living in America has access to wealth and connections that the average African can only dream of. That shouldn't take away from anyone's success here or diminish any of our accomplishments
This is logically incoherent. The fact that a larger disparity exists between the ultra-wealthy in the West and impoverished people in the third world (though, to be fair, many parts of the West are beginning to resemble the third world) does not invalidate the point that inequality also exists within the first world.
Just because impoverished Africans can't get Ashton Kutcher to invest in their startup doesn't mean that you or I can.
Because I'm feeling a bit (just a tiny bit, I feel I'm almost beyond that) envious I almost want to celebrate your comment. Although there is a lot of true into this we have to admit that even kids born into riches are not that much more likely to be a world success. Because unless you have the will/desire to succeed you probably won't get that far. (Going to an ivy league school and working a nice cushy job is not enough in my book)
Granted, some people have been put closer to the finish line then most of us but I rather not take that as an excuse to explain away my lack of success.
p.s. I grew up in NYC to a working class poor immigrant family. The fact that I grew up in NYC is all the head start I needed. So far I've made to graduate school. There is still a long road ahead. No use complaining about which family I was born into.
Define "success." Being born into a rich family and going to an Ivy league school won't get you an instant $30m in the bank, but unless the apple really falls far from the tree, you won't have to try very hard to get into the top 5% in a country where even below-median people live pretty well. Not a bad ROI on simply choosing your parents well.
we have to admit that even kids born into riches are not that much more likely to be a world success.
They are MUCH less likely to wind up bleeding out on a streetcorner in the Tenderloin or creaking along on subsistence wages. It's rarely about "world success."
When people complain about overpaid football players, or overpaid Wall Street executives, etc, is "envy" the first word that really comes to your mind?
How many financial executives are there in the U.S.? Should we assume that each of their children founded a company and exited profitably by the age of 17?
Let's not take too much away from what this person accomplished.
For those who don’t recognize this, it is a quote from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxay [1]. The context is: Ford is an (intelligent) hitch-hiker and CHAIRMAN and MARKETING GIRL are parts of the "useless third" of the population of Golgafrincham (basically, middle managers and the like), who were exiled from the planet entirely. (Perceived sexism attributable to Douglas Adams and/or the fact this was a radio broadcast, so everyone has an assigned gender)
It's also very unjust. Where were Douglas Engelbart's billions? Tim Berners-Lee, is he a billionaire? No, we have 17 year olds making quick millions gluing together the work of dozens of Ph.D's who will never see that kind of money in their lifetimes.
I'm not sure this is fair. Look at the number of entrepreneurs that actually succeed, then look at the positions that people with a CS Ph.D actually end up in. On average (using a median), I'm willing to bet those with a CS Ph.d do a lot better than your average startup founder. We just hear about success stories.
All of this is also ignoring the huge benefits that come with becoming a professor, if you are able to. The kind of pay, job security, and benefits that come with the MIT professorship that Berners-Lee has are enormously beneficial to ones peace of mind.
If you aren't satisfied with the way the government is being run, is it a failure of Representative Democracy? You can petition your representative. If you still aren't satisfied you can cast your vote for another representative.
If you aren't satisfied with the way your capital is being allocated, is it a failure of Capitalism? You can petition your board members. If still aren't satisfied you can vote for new board members in the next election. If you still aren't satisfied you can sell -- in Yahoo's case many shareholders have chosen this option since Microsoft's $31/share offer. If you want to allocate other people's capital, see previous paragraph.
Leaving aside the notion of justice, since it is a Difficult Philosophical Issue ♪, to me the only thing that this underscores is that Yahoo is a poor allocator of capital.
People don't really realize it, but the mid 1950's through mid 1970's, besides being the golden age of the American economy, was also the golden age of American innovation, and much of it was bankrolled by DOD money (SRI is, of course, a major defense contractor). Not only was the infrastructure around us mostly built during that time (the highways, power plants, etc) but most concepts in computing: programming languages, AI, GUIs, databases, etc.
Over time I become more and more convinced that the market doesn't produce (much) real innovation. If you look at the stuff that really matters, it's come from one of three sources:
1) Government research labs (NASA) or government funded defense contractors (Lockeed-Martin, SRI, BBN, etc)
2) Government funded universities (MIT and its $1 billion in defense contracts each year)
3) Private companies that have either monopolies (AT&T Bell Labs) or massive market power with entrenched cash-cow products (IBM, Xerox PARC).
Look at innovation that's happening now. Where is it happening? Self-driving cars got a big boost from DARPA in the early 2000's (DARPA Grand Challenge), and is now being funded by Google (which has a ton of cash from its deeply entrenched position in search).
I think that undervalues the innovation that goes into taking a new technology and turning it into a widely available, affordable product. That is not easy, and without that step, no invention is going to change the world very much.
I also think it undervalues the role of the market in creating the capital to fund these activities, and the many different companies and universities (many private) who compete to spend that money in innovative ways.
By comparison, the Soviet Union centrally funded their core research too, but were not able to keep up technologically with market economies like the U.S. or western Europe.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, at least in the sense that I do agree that market economies create wealth and wealth is a necessary pre-requisite for funding research. What I think I'm getting at is that I disagree with the common trope that market competition creates fundamental innovation. I think market competition makes companies slaves to the bottom line, fighting tooth and nail in the dirt just to survive. To the extent that the market creates innovation, it does so in companies well-insulated from market competition (monopolies, oligopolies, etc). The decline of Hewlett Packard is a great example. When they became just another hardware company, competing on price in printers, PC's, etc, they ceased to be innovative.
> Over time I become more and more convinced that the market doesn't produce (much) real innovation.
This is something I've researched a bit in the past. It ends up being a case of semantics. The market produces plenty of innovation but not much basic research; whether it encourages invention is ambiguous.
These three terms (innovation, invention, discovery) are well-defined in the academic literature; typically innovation is the only act of progress that can be monetized. Innovation occurs both on a technical level (hey, this transistor doo-hickey can be put in microchips!) and procedural (hey, organizing in an assembly line increases the speed with which we can make model T's!). Invention is creating something new from known principles, innovation is applying an invention, and discovery is finding previously unknown principles.
First: Je viens en paix. So, please, don't turn this into a mud-slinging competition.
Also, because of the ambiguity that exists in the English language I should clarify that this is addressed to the general HN audience rather than to api. In other words, when I use "you" it is generally meant as the plural "you".
I have a genuine problem understanding where anti-capitalism sentiment, particularly in HN, comes from. I also have a huge problem with pro-government sentiment bordering on socialism and even going as far as having a communist undertone. I keep seeing this come up again and again on HN and I just don't get it. I don't understand it.
So, this is me asking for help. Why do you (plural) think this way?
Again, please, I am looking for a respectful conversation. This is about you, not me. I want to understand you. I have lots of questions. Some might sound dumb and maybe even off-base. Go with me, if you will, humor me, and see if you can help me --and others-- understand where you are coming from.
How far back in human history do we have to go until you would concede we don't owe what existed at that point in time to state-funded research? Fire? Hunting? The wheel? Agriculture? Making clothes? Making boats? Domestication of animals? Medieval time? Industrial revolution?
And, when feudal lords enslaved the population, was that population to be thankful because of the developments that came from such "state-funded" efforts?
Communism funded lots of things. Not sure anything of use to the world at large came out of any communist country. Do you think communism is better than capitalism? Why? How about socialist ideas? Better than capitalism?
The Nazi's funded a lot of medical research in the context of killing millions of Jews. Are you suggesting that we all benefit from that today? Are there a few million people somewhere in the world you would be willing to kill today in order to do some state-funded research that would benefit us all?
I know this is a ridiculous and grotesque question to ask, but it is a valid question. If you are deriving any benefit whatsoever from what the Nazi's did then you either have to reject all technology derived from that research --even if it costs your own life or that of your loved ones-- or be willing to do the same in the name of progress. I am not proposing, for even an instant, that what they did was acceptable.
Where do you stop singing the praises of state-funded research? How many people did ARPANET help kill? If we owe the modern Internet to all the military programs between 1960 and 199x or so and you recognize this as good; what's the difference between that and the various Nazi programs. Killing is killing, isn't it?
Well, virtually all state-funded research is motivated by war. War means killing people. Sometimes by the millions. Certainly by the thousands. And, in that regard --in terms of the mass killings-- it is no different from genocide.
How about nuclear power? A great result of state-funded research? Killed millions.
So, in embracing your belief system, do we ever fault governments or do we always look at the rosy side of state-funded research and ignore the ugly parts. As I asked before, how many people did ARPANET help kill? Is that ever a consideration? I am not sure Compuserve and other civilian BBS's helped kill nearly as many people --if any-- as the various means of communication resulting from state-funded research.
When I was younger the realities of war never really hit my radar. As I got older it really started to turn my stomach. And that's why I developed this idea that we should limit our government to throwing fancy dinners for visiting dignitaries and pull ALL non essential funding from their hands. All they do is kill people, one way or the other. The research would be done far better, cheaper, faster and with less violent purposes in the private sector.
I prefer capitalism and profit-driven entrepreneurship than war-driven state-sponsored research who's aim is to kill mil...
I think you took his comment a bit too far: the point is that the government is an institution that is meant to mitigate risks that cannot efficiently be dealt with otherwise.
The risk of going to the moon before anyone else is such a risk (political motivations aside).
Stating that the government can be an effective tool for mitigating risks associated with research is not an endorsement of everything the government does. This is not an endorsement of everything governments have done in the past. This isn't even an endorsement of government at all in its current form.
It is a statement of what our government ought to be doing more of. It is a statement that our current system has disproportionately distributed rewards -- aren't we supposed to reward those who create the most value?
OK, I grant you that. I did say I wasn't aiming my post at him though. I've just seen a --in my eyes at least-- seemingly blind pro-government, pro public-sector bend in HN that always seems to float to the surface and I simply don't understand it. I'm not fighting it at this point because I clearly don't understand it. I have to understand it first before I can go past that. Not a molecule in my body thinks this way, so I need help.
As far as the distribution of rewards. The market decides that. Obviously the market --the average consumer-- does not think government is producing enough value or they would be flush with cash. If government produced real value we would be throwing money at them, me included.
With regards to the question of risky or very, very long term research.
Do we really believe government is good at this at all? I don't really see it that way. If you compare the evolution of technologies in private hands vs. that of publicly funded programs, what are the results?
Perhaps the best comparison is to compare efforts in the old Soviet Union with efforts in similar industries in the US. For all their might, the Soviets couldn't make a car worth a damn. During the same period in the US a multitude of private companies produced design after design and evolved solutions that were ages better than anything coming out of the Soviets.
Even Igor Sikorsky ultimately had to emigrate to the US in order to have his helicopter designs grow out of private efforts and evolve as they have. Little known fact: Composer Sergei Rachmaninov funded Sikorsky to the tune of $5,000 to help him launch his company.
Now, of course, as any good entrepreneur would do, you look for where you can sell your products. If government wants to buy you are not going to say "no". And, if government wants to throw more money at you to build other products for them you are going to follow suit. A lot had to happen before government could shovel money at Sikorsky. Other similar stories abound.
Then there's the question of whether or not government is actually equipped to truly make long reaching decision. Few decisions are really made with a clear view of what the future outcome might be. Why did we go to the moon? It was part of an arms race with the Soviets. Not much more than that. Again, war. I have a very fundamental problem with this idea of doing all of these things and spending all of this money to be better at war-making. It really stinks.
Was the lunar program truly worth the investment? Could we have produced similar or better results through other programs?
I am watching companies like SpaceX with great interest. The drive, focus and priorities private enterprise has, when combined with people hell-bent to make it happen, cannot be paralleled by any organization assembled by government. The mindset is massively different.
We could point at side benefits of technologies like GPS. Great stuff, right? Again, what was the motivator? Military. War. More efficient killing. Yuk! The civilian use of GPS was never a part of the program or the driving motivators.
And so, nearly all "good" technology that has come out of any government effort is almost always linked to military needs. If there are no military needs government either does not do it or they fail miserably.
This is the aspect of the whole pro-government, pro-public sector, pro-state-funded mentality I am not getting. You can't point at ARPANET as a state-funded research success without pointing at the thousand or millions (who knows) of people it was surely responsible for helping kill. One goes with the other. There is not dividing line. The state did not initiate these programs to help milk cows or to help us buy books online. They launched and funded these programs to create better killing systems for the wars they need to conduct.
I know I am harping on the military connection. I am eager to have someone provide me with a list of state-funded technologies that DO NOT have their genesis in a fundamental military...
In my biased opinion I'd suggest you study western and northern European democracies. The government provides essential services (decentralized up to the district level) like education, water, streets, police, health care, social security for it's citizens.
I'd rather have clean water and unbiased police and justice and free education. Every private company needs to maximize their own profit. The government does not need to do this. They can subsidize important but nonprofitable projects. This can be and has been made efficient.
There is no interest in a private prison company to reduce crime. There is also not much reason for a private rail company to invest in infrastructure that not profitable. But as a citizen I have an interest to use a efficient train.
It's not black and white. Private sector is very good at a lot of things. But there are certain other things that are natural monopolies or important for the functioning of the society that in my opinion can be best served by an efficient government.
The private sector and capitalism do not also not always work in your interest - Adam Curtis from the BBC (also government :) did a great documentation about certain effects of free market radicalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set
> The government provides essential services (decentralized up to the district level) like education, water, streets, police, health care, social security for it's citizens.
I wonder if herein lies the fundamental difference. I would never put it the way you have.
The people form the government and pay them to administer infrastructure and services for them. That is massively different than the "government does for it's people" view. One is almost a royals-and-subjects view while the other says, well, government of the people, by the people and for the people.
In my model we hire the government to serve us. They are nothing more than our employees.
The other data point I have is that as a youngster my family spent quite a number of years in Argentina. Monkeys would govern that country better than nearly any administration they have had to endure. I have followed their politics on and off over the years. To this day they continue to be raped and pillaged by their government. The only way you can characterize them is thugs, thieves and gangsters. It is quite possible that seeing some of the things I saw there planted the seeds for not seeing government as part of the solution as an adult. I mean, look at Cyprus.
I wouldn't look to a private prison company to reduce crime because that's not the need they are pursuing. The commercial war on crime tends to be waged by associations that roughly map to where/how crimes are committed and chambers of commerce. These organizations are the pooled efforts of businesses to fight common problems.
A private rail company might decide to lay down unprofitable track to massively grow demand and habitual preference for rail travel. Or, it might stick to more profitable tracks and in exchange not have to pass on the costs of disparate routes to the customers in the high-density areas.
I don't believe he went too far, I think he is just trolling. As someone who lost a close friend in a war and who had grandparents who lose relatives because of the Soviets and the Nazis, I think he's just talking bullshit in trying to advance the old Randian Gospel and its false dilemmas of calling everyone Socialists.
I was to answer him, but I could not believe he's doing this to listen,as he claim. I also would not hold my anger.
Well, considering that my family lost quote a few members to genocide I think I am entitled to detest war. And, no, I am not trolling. You shouldn't be angry at all. This is just a conversation.
Pointing out that the vast majority of the technology stemming from state-funded research came from military programs is nothing less than the truth.
Ok, I'll give you the benefit of doubt, I'm not angry anymore and realized it was stupid to be in the first place.
I'll not enter in a discussion with you here and now, politically I'm very pragmatic, although I'm pretty Conservative (As a Tory used to be some years ago). This post brought some memories (of my friend) which are uncomfortable in certain situations and with the due respect to my grandparents I'll also pass this one.
> As an example, most religions folks were indoctrinated into their religion. I don't know anyone who grew up without any kind of religion shoveled at them as a kid, only to choose one independently as an adult.
It is a fair question: Are you pro state/government/communism/socialism because you chose to believe this way or because the thoughts were shoveled into your head? Can you remove yourself from your mind far enough to even make that evaluation?
Attended private and public schools (nearly a 50/50 split). Private school was not quite religious but had a Christian church next as part of the campus and some of our teachers were the priests. Became an atheist somewhere in college. Highly entrepreneurial family. Have been an entrepreneur myself since probably high school. Started and ran half a dozen businesses with my own money. Also worked in industry (employee) at various levels (Junior Engineer to CTO) for about twenty years.
I was more refering to where you grew up, or other things that might be correlated to setting the groundstones for a persons political outlook/philosophy. Sorry for not being specific.
I think you're being a little unfair. I work in quantum computing. I'll probably work in the public sector for most of my life. I have every incentive to plug government-funded research, and oh by the way, you guys all need to vote for politicians who will increase my puny grad student stipend.
Researchers in the private sector publish a healthy amount of papers in peer-reviewed journals. The elephant in the room is drug design. Many of the drugs on the market today were indeed developed and funded by pharmaceutical companies; yes, pharma companies do occasionally push bullshit products. But imatinib works. It's a trillion-dollar industry for a reason.
As an aside, academia probably shouldn't be lumped under the banner of "state" -- the independence of academia helps it succeed.
>This is a problem for today's generation of enthusiastic free-market proponents. Who is going to pay for the next generation of innovation?
Take a deep breath. The bottom line is this: scientific research is cheap.
The US spends a paltry portion of its budget on research. Hell, I think they even spend more on education. Funny, right? So in the context of the great economic circus, publically funding scientific research affects the "freeness" of the market about as much as publically funding, say, the police. Even Ron Paul wasn't looking to make very large cuts to research.
And that's another reason you should vote for whoever is going to increase my salary: it won't hardly cost you anything.
I think you're being a little unfair. I work in quantum computing. I'll probably work in the public sector for most of my life. I have every incentive to plug government-funded research, and oh by the way, you guys all need to vote for politicians who will increase my puny grad student stipend.
Quantum computing is fucking cool. Very intellectually challenging stuff. Props for that.
I agree on public funding for basic research. Politicians who say "these guys aren't earning their keep" are idiots, and we're worse (as a populace) for not firing these assholes. The mechanism is right there, it's unambiguously legal. Let's fucking use it. Anyway, how is a PhD who makes $85,000 per year while advancing the state of science, who is giving all the work away for the public good, not earning her keep? It makes no damn sense.
Researchers in the private sector publish a healthy amount of papers in peer-reviewed journals. The elephant in the room is drug design. Many of the drugs on the market today were indeed developed and funded by pharmaceutical companies; yes, pharma companies do occasionally push bullshit products. But imatinib works. It's a trillion-dollar industry for a reason.
My issue with the drug industry is that the profit motive seems to be generating 20 variations on the same theme (e.g. statins) and underfunding a lot of greater advancements.
The US spends a paltry portion of its budget on research
Damn right. It's pathetic. We spend more on this "war on terror" in one year than on cancer research in 50. Yet cancer kills orders of magnitude more people than terrorism.
>What this really underscores is that conventional capitalism provides little incentive for fundamental innovation.
No, what this really underscores is a fundamental change in thinking for equality that our civilizations seeks since centuries: taking people seriously, no matter of gender, race or in this case age. Many people have good reason to be jealous, being jealous this was not possible when they/we were so young.
When I was that age I hated the fact that only old people would be taken seriously when it comes to business. We can be happy this is possible and as a further sign that age discrimination is going to be eradicated. Besides, this is about discrimination of young people but old people are discriminated against too.
Military research may have made done early development on networking protocols, but it was capitalism and the free market principals that took if from "something that could have potential" to the "humanities greatest creation."
Saying that government created the internet would be like giving a government credit for creating cars because while making new weapons, they accidentally made wheel.
Military research may have made done early development on networking protocols, but it was capitalism and the free market principals that took if from "something that could have potential" to the "humanities greatest creation."
Saying that government created the internet would be like giving a government credit for creating cars because while making new weapons, they accidentally made wheel.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] thread1M+ downloads for an app with licensed technology is noteworthy.
There are some excellent professionals out there with a far more rigorously proven and solid track record of knowing how to reach an audience. You're suggesting the 17-yr-old & 2 compatriots have proven themselves to possess $30-million-worth of reaching-an-audience skill?
[edit: spelling]
To be fair, however, I think we'd all agree that his accomplishments by that point were of a significantly higher caliber.
"Summly's entire business model seems to revolve around catering to this demographic. Frankly, it pains me."
I reads like a critique of Chubby Checker's "Twist" from a professor a Julliard. Perhaps, and I say that because I can't know what they were really thinking, but perhaps that was the point. This company had successfully "catered to this demographic" (which was defined as young hipster like brogrammers) and while those guys drink their PBR and deck out their mancaves perhaps it is a demographic that Yahoo desperately wants to reach? Maybe the whole point was that Yahoo folks were building things for middle-aged dot boomers and not for the cool kids.
Maybe the goal was to get more people who could quickly assemble a MVP from existing APIs that appealed to the emerging cohort of buyers and trendsetters. Maybe NLP wasn't the point.
Oh man reading that I just realized that was exactly describing the type of consulting gigs I always get (and I'm young).
Are we a side effect of the pump-and-dump VC culture or is this a legitimate new way of developing software/products?
However, I feel like people aren't very upfront with the fact that they are building on top of APIs. For whatever reason, there's this perception that arranging existing resources into a more valuable arrangement is somehow not a valid approach.
I'd love to hear others thoughts on this.
Imagine how many MVPs Yahoo's existing staff could create if allocated $30 million of development time for skunkworks projects...
There is a lot to be said for building the right thing; but the actual ability to assemble such products are very common and even the very premium skills are definitely for sale at market rates much lower than $15MM per year.
Thanks Professor, now I don't have to continue reading your post – ie, you're kind of a jerk.
If your response is "but everyone knows which president you were referring to," then surely it's fair game to refer to whoever that is since the facts are universally accepted? :-)
I think there's a new qualification for TL;DR - DFIAT - didn't fit in a tweet.
So much of what goes on in transactions in Silicon Valley has little to do with the headlines and a lot to do with power brokers and their interests.
It's a shame we don't have investigative journalism in Silicon Valley any more - partly because it's out of vogue nationally, and partly because Silicon Valley journalists love to hob-nob with investors. I'd love to see a follow-the-money on this deal.
In fact I think it will be beneficial for Yahoo's future, but not for the reasons PR and news stories are hyping it.
The problem for Yahoo now is to explain it to investors who takes it all at face value.
I started reading your comment (first 9 words), nearly stopped reading it thinking "they don't get it," carried on for some reason and 5 words later it showed that I agreed with you completely!
Yahoo irrationally overpays for tons of stuff, AOL irrationally overpaid for Bebo, there was that high school girl that made a social network and makes millions of dollars so she bought her mom a house, there are plenty of other data points I filed away in my head over the years.
Tons of things happen in Silicon Valley everyday that makes no sense to outsiders, or sometimes even to those stuck in the tunnel. Are you new here? Sit, enjoy a cup of tea meanwhile.
Throw on top of that the youth obsession in tech has been around since I was 17 eleven years ago and it will continue to stay. Youth is forever a distraction that you have to grow out of. If you don't then consider seeking a therapist.
Your brain hurts from trying to neatly organize this particular liquidity event as fair? Maybe you can't. Maybe it doesn't matter. Get over it, stop the hating, and get back to work.
Funny enough, mainstream media with old talking heads are spinning this narrative two ways: 1) the ever louder need to get every child to learn to code and 2) it's so fun bit of escapism to think what you would have done with big money when you're still a teenager contrasted against the $325MM Powerball win in New York.
All in all, this barely registers as a blip on the average American considering real shit that's ongoing with fairness over marriage equality in SCOTUS.
I've been saying this for the last three years here on Hn: Yahoo is stupid to not be aggressively and heavily spending their massive cash reserves to buy back into an innovative place here in the valley.
Mayer is no dope! She knows that being the convoluted portal that Yahoo is, is a death sentence. They need to act quick and fast and often.
Buying up a very young tech upstart is a good step toward splicing in some new, nimble DNA - which Yahoo needs desperately.
$30MM is also a marketing number!
Remember when everyone's exit plan was Google or Facebook? Well, add Yahoo to the list for exit acquire players.
Marissa Mayer may be able to stave that off this time around and Yahoo may be able to buy their way into mobile, but when mobile is so hit-driven and short-term, it seems unwise to start spending money on little things like silly TL;DR apps (that you're going to shut down, anyway).
If the deal is about pushing into mobile, Yahoo needs to secure culture changers, not apps. They need to buy the Duartes and Rubensteins and Brichters, and give them full autonomy to run the mobile ship however they please. That's a longer term plan, but it pays off in actual tangible results. $100 says we never hear anything about Summly's technology again, and the kid leaves as soon as his stock vests.
Yahoo is a web 1.0 company, pre-crash and just didn't have it in their DNA to innovate out - like you said, they choked those previous acquisitions to death.
That doesn't mean that the strategy of acquiring their way back to a good position is bad - it was that the leaders previously attempting to do so just didn't have it in them.
I say that Mayer is their last hope.
Sumly is three people and they paid about $30 million for it. Start throwing million dollar /year offers and many "good" programmers will want to work there. This stinks, IMO.
Like much of the commentary in the other story, you're projecting. The article is a discussion of why this deal is stupid, not bellyaching about it being unfair.
15 year old kid does something with computers and for some reason the press is all over it. Some smart investors thinks; "hey, I can use this to make money". They invest money into this 15 year old which gives him more press coverage. Wait a few years and the investor gets his buddies at Yahoo to buy it for a substantial amount of money. Ka-ching, money in the bank.
The first investor was Horizons Ventures, the investment arm of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, who put in $300k.
Besides, we don't know Ka-Shing isn't reading TechCrunch all day.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/655740.stm
"Police had to step in to keep order among investors queuing to buy shares as the internet gold rush swept dramatically into Hong Kong.
A crowd of about 30,000 people formed outside one of the few banks where small investors could apply for shares in internet firm tom.com.
...
Thousands of investors pushed and shoved through queues stretching back as far as half a mile to hand in their forms at the worst hit HSBC branch in Kowloon.
Analysts have predicted that the Hong Kong firm's share sale will prove to have been a record 2,000 times over-subscribed."
http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-sons-rise-in-the-states-2...
"..and for some reason the press is all over it"
I'd want to know where my chunk of the pie is.
This is absolutely incorrect. There are many instances in which there is a personal financial connection between a board member and an acquired company. For example, a board member is a limited in a VC fund.
Didn't bother reading after that.
If you'd read the text more carefully you wouldn't have missed the sarcasm of the passage you were so quick to dismiss. He was being sarcastic!
You get more points than the informative posts because you are the glue - the viscous, translucent glue that makes the Hacker News comment pages always stick together into a big, messy ball of self-satisfied cluelessness.
This deal is not about the tech, or the kid. The kid does sound smart though, so I am happy for him.
The app has been pulled from the app store( http://summly.tumblr.com/post/46247554262/yahoo-agrees-to-ac... ), and it does not sound like it's going to be back. Which is a disappointment, because I wanted to know exactly what the heck the app is, since I've never heard of it before.
So Yahoo's dropped any market penetration, the entire brand, and the million users. For 3 engineers and a few software API licenses.
I did not realize they were shutting them down.
EDIT they could be buying market-product fit...? but yes, if they killed it... hmmm...
[0]: http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/03/26/what-does-30-mil...
This is not a simple story of a hard working smart kid winning the tech lottery with a hot app/technology going from rags to riches. This is an arranged marriage, a PR stunt and a good-ole-boy deal all rolled into one. It's a VC fuck-you to all people that truly have innovative ideas, viable businesses, and dedicated employees that are trying to get management to notice solutions instead of golfing with "consultants" or blowing big money on solutions that could be built in-house for 1% of the costs.
The kid was born on third base, got home on a wild pitch and some folks think he hit a home run.
What? No it doesn't signal that at all. Look at Yahoo's other recent acquisitions. Yahoo is buying mobile app companies. Spinning it as technology vs glue is silly. It's all about buying expertise in mobile.
The story goes something like (a) people (yahoo) want mobile apps (b) the kid got investors to give him cash (c) people downloaded it generating 'buzz' (d) more investors and cash (e) more downloads and publicity (f) yahoo plays right into the hands of the investors and the hype around a young founder (g) yahoo buys the company, making the kid a millionaire, it's a PR grand slam, bringing more publicity and 'users' to the app (for now)
It works out really, really well for the investors and founder; in my opinion it seems like Yahoo got duped.
There aren't any new users getting added. The app's been pulled from the iOS app store.
http://summly.tumblr.com/post/46247554262/yahoo-agrees-to-ac...
I am in finance. I am glue. I take existing people, things (read: capital), and ideas and bolt them together. Glue is the socioeconomic fabric that gives value to ideas, things, and ultimately people.
It's not just finance. Craigslist? Airbnb? Facebook? Apple? Glue. Put it this way: if you walked out the door with their source code, how much of their value could you replicate? Put it another way: how much would you pay to walk out the door with their source code and physical assets? Put it another way: how much would you pay to walk out the door with their source code, physical assets, and low to mid-level developers but none of their senior guys?
We have laws to protect intellectual property because thoughts and technologies are copyable, fungible, and ultimately outsource-able. We don't need such laws to protect relationships, the gluiest of glues. In fact, we need laws to break down their strength.
What are you saying? Google, Craigslist, the Museum of Natural History and Earnest Hemingway have no meaning without glue like finance?
I don't think anyone would argue that glue is naturally less valuable. The problem is that our current economic structure treats glue as if it creates approximately ALL of the value because we haven't figured out a good way to split value between different stages of the pipeline (IP isn't a good way).
Over-investing in glue is bad insofar as it comes at the expense of investing in fundamental technologies/research. Since our (over)valuation of glue currently places a rather heavy opportunity cost on performing said research and endorses the "academia is a waste" attitude, I tend to agree that our economy is too focused on glue.
You are conflating the "thought vs. glue" ratio with the "past thought vs. currently generating thought" ratio.
Glue takes thought, so the dichotomy is a bit rickety out of the door. I'm taking it as network value versus technical value. Both take present thought.
If you walked out the door of Apple with source code and "source code" for their hardware, you could replicate a lot of their value for the immediate future, until they had time to cook up new stuff.
You are correct in that more of Facebook or Craigslist's values are comprised by network effects, but I still believe more of Apple is network effect than not.
Consider the walking-out-of-the-door-with-the-blueprints hypothetical. You would still need to cobble together a supply chain, i.e. glue together a string of "doers" and make sure the glue is strong enough so the whole thing doesn't fly apart like a 787.
Remember the Hacker News refrain about execution versus MBA-style "ideation"? The execution guys are valuable because they know where to find what and whom, not because they ninja together the eleventh hour code themselves.
Maybe a more interesting hypothetical is "what could the 2nd place competitor do if they got blueprints and source code, and could use it freely?". In terms of Facebook and Craigslist, nothing much. In terms of Apple, Samsung could probably go to town with it, although I suppose you could also argue that "the right to use it freely" is in some ways the most important bit, as Samsung can probably replicate the hardware, and has good enough software at this point.
In the case of finance, it's the fact that they operate as the middleman, getting money from one place to another. The product isn't just getting people together, it's providing a smooth way to move money around.
The other examples have a product where individual technologies were melded together to produce that specific product. They did much more than just take a few technologies, then bolt them together.
On the other hand, Summly seems like the technology should be the product. NLP is a very hot research topic, and when I first saw that the product went for $30 mil, I thought that they had some brand new NLP technique or algorithm that Yahoo was snapping up. In fact, several articles, like this NY Times article(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/business/media/nick-dalois... ) supported that view.
However, the truth is that they just took a pre-existing tech, and bolted it onto an iOS application. I can't comment about the app, since it's been pulled from the iOS store, but it does sound like they attempted to do something new with the interface, but that's about it. So Yahoo basically bought 2 engineers and a Siri NLP engine license, the later of which will undoubtedly become more expensive when the contract is renegotiated.
If you are glue, there is a terrible problem. When you are in finance you should be in the "Thought". You should think on who can pay the bills and who can not, so you could give loans to them or not.
You should be on thinking what is going to be the future and the business strategies that makes sense, business that are sound and solid versus scams to get people's money.
The fact that you consider yourself glue is the main problem. We are in a society when finance means "too big to fail", "we make bad decisions but do not pay for it", and "if people can not pay back its loans(because we lended irresponsibly) , we have to lower the requirements for loans even more".
And most of us are, indeed, jelly. The bottom line is, if you're into start-ups, you understand that in many ways it's a lottery. Instagram won last week, then Pinterest, and now Summly. This is the norm. Over-paying for products that aren't really even products.
I'm surprised a professor at Cornell hasn't understood the VC culture yet. I was talking to a friend last week about this cute chick he wanted to introduce me to. Turns out she works at a relatively famous startup in L.A. as a secretary. It also turns out that she makes more than my mom (who's a research chemist). I've just learned to /sigh, move on and then quickly get back to work.
Throwing money around is how Silicon Valley works. Get used to it.
Are we going to ridicule Tesla Motors for making (highly innovative) cars because they licensed the steering wheel or navigation system from another company?
What kind of logic is that?
Yeah, he did something right. But the article didn't question that.
The analogy to Tesla is not fitting because Tesla actually does innovate.
Google's primarily goal isn't to own every computer screen, they just hope that their ads make it to every screen. Yahoo's goal is to fill every screen. For Yahoo buying screen space is a end in itself.
If we're done picking on looks and personal issues, something I tried to avoid very carefully in the article, perhaps we can focus on content and ideas?
Or am I missing the sense in which we're using "bro" here?
> Or am I missing the sense in which we're using "bro" here?
I'll bite. You are completely missing the sense of brogrammer. Brogrammer refers to behavior and attitude and not looks or activities.
All this stuff we're gluing together is the product of state-funded research, mostly from the cold war era. DARPANet, the web (CERN), DARPA research on "augmented human intelligence," etc.
Stuff like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
(I bet you thought Xerox PARC invented that stuff, right? Or Apple? Nope. DARPA and SRI invented the entire modern user experience in the 1960s.)
Few companies ever fund that kind of thing. There's two reasons. One is risk vs. reward-- such projects are typically "high risk, high payoff" as DARPA likes to say. Most lead nowhere. The second reason is that there is no good mechanism for monetizing the result. Fundamental innovations are often too fundamental to patent effectively, and are easy to copy once understood. They're also often worthless in themselves. They are enablers of value that is built on top of them.
Fundamental innovation is a lot like infrastructure -- something else free market players seldom invest in.
This is a problem for today's generation of enthusiastic free-market proponents. Who is going to pay for the next generation of innovation?
It's also very unjust. Where were Douglas Engelbart's billions? Tim Berners-Lee, is he a billionaire? No, we have 17 year olds making quick millions gluing together the work of dozens of Ph.D's who will never see that kind of money in their lifetimes.
It's a big thing that turned me off the Ph.D path. I don't feel like taking a vow of poverty and toiling in the dungeons to develop some fundamental, difficult concept that someone else then takes, glues to something else, flips, and gets rich.
Just because impoverished Africans can't get Ashton Kutcher to invest in their startup doesn't mean that you or I can.
Granted, some people have been put closer to the finish line then most of us but I rather not take that as an excuse to explain away my lack of success.
p.s. I grew up in NYC to a working class poor immigrant family. The fact that I grew up in NYC is all the head start I needed. So far I've made to graduate school. There is still a long road ahead. No use complaining about which family I was born into.
They are MUCH less likely to wind up bleeding out on a streetcorner in the Tenderloin or creaking along on subsistence wages. It's rarely about "world success."
Let's not take too much away from what this person accomplished.
MARKETING GIRL: Er, yeah, well we’re having a little, er, difficulty here…
FORD: Difficulty?! It’s the single simplest machine in the entire universe!
MARKETING GIRL: Well alright mister wise guy, if you’re so clever you tell us what colour it should be!
FORD: Oh Mighty Zarquon! Has no-one done anything?
[1]: http://www.clivebanks.co.uk/THHGTTG/THHGTTGradio6.htm
I'm not sure this is fair. Look at the number of entrepreneurs that actually succeed, then look at the positions that people with a CS Ph.D actually end up in. On average (using a median), I'm willing to bet those with a CS Ph.d do a lot better than your average startup founder. We just hear about success stories.
All of this is also ignoring the huge benefits that come with becoming a professor, if you are able to. The kind of pay, job security, and benefits that come with the MIT professorship that Berners-Lee has are enormously beneficial to ones peace of mind.
If you aren't satisfied with the way your capital is being allocated, is it a failure of Capitalism? You can petition your board members. If still aren't satisfied you can vote for new board members in the next election. If you still aren't satisfied you can sell -- in Yahoo's case many shareholders have chosen this option since Microsoft's $31/share offer. If you want to allocate other people's capital, see previous paragraph.
Leaving aside the notion of justice, since it is a Difficult Philosophical Issue ♪, to me the only thing that this underscores is that Yahoo is a poor allocator of capital.
♪ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equality/#PriEquJus
Over time I become more and more convinced that the market doesn't produce (much) real innovation. If you look at the stuff that really matters, it's come from one of three sources:
1) Government research labs (NASA) or government funded defense contractors (Lockeed-Martin, SRI, BBN, etc)
2) Government funded universities (MIT and its $1 billion in defense contracts each year)
3) Private companies that have either monopolies (AT&T Bell Labs) or massive market power with entrenched cash-cow products (IBM, Xerox PARC).
Look at innovation that's happening now. Where is it happening? Self-driving cars got a big boost from DARPA in the early 2000's (DARPA Grand Challenge), and is now being funded by Google (which has a ton of cash from its deeply entrenched position in search).
I also think it undervalues the role of the market in creating the capital to fund these activities, and the many different companies and universities (many private) who compete to spend that money in innovative ways.
By comparison, the Soviet Union centrally funded their core research too, but were not able to keep up technologically with market economies like the U.S. or western Europe.
Interesting reading: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/features.... You should really buy a copy of Tim Wu's book to appreciate Vail's line of thought.
This is something I've researched a bit in the past. It ends up being a case of semantics. The market produces plenty of innovation but not much basic research; whether it encourages invention is ambiguous.
These three terms (innovation, invention, discovery) are well-defined in the academic literature; typically innovation is the only act of progress that can be monetized. Innovation occurs both on a technical level (hey, this transistor doo-hickey can be put in microchips!) and procedural (hey, organizing in an assembly line increases the speed with which we can make model T's!). Invention is creating something new from known principles, innovation is applying an invention, and discovery is finding previously unknown principles.
Also, because of the ambiguity that exists in the English language I should clarify that this is addressed to the general HN audience rather than to api. In other words, when I use "you" it is generally meant as the plural "you".
I have a genuine problem understanding where anti-capitalism sentiment, particularly in HN, comes from. I also have a huge problem with pro-government sentiment bordering on socialism and even going as far as having a communist undertone. I keep seeing this come up again and again on HN and I just don't get it. I don't understand it.
So, this is me asking for help. Why do you (plural) think this way?
Again, please, I am looking for a respectful conversation. This is about you, not me. I want to understand you. I have lots of questions. Some might sound dumb and maybe even off-base. Go with me, if you will, humor me, and see if you can help me --and others-- understand where you are coming from.
How far back in human history do we have to go until you would concede we don't owe what existed at that point in time to state-funded research? Fire? Hunting? The wheel? Agriculture? Making clothes? Making boats? Domestication of animals? Medieval time? Industrial revolution?
And, when feudal lords enslaved the population, was that population to be thankful because of the developments that came from such "state-funded" efforts?
Communism funded lots of things. Not sure anything of use to the world at large came out of any communist country. Do you think communism is better than capitalism? Why? How about socialist ideas? Better than capitalism?
The Nazi's funded a lot of medical research in the context of killing millions of Jews. Are you suggesting that we all benefit from that today? Are there a few million people somewhere in the world you would be willing to kill today in order to do some state-funded research that would benefit us all?
I know this is a ridiculous and grotesque question to ask, but it is a valid question. If you are deriving any benefit whatsoever from what the Nazi's did then you either have to reject all technology derived from that research --even if it costs your own life or that of your loved ones-- or be willing to do the same in the name of progress. I am not proposing, for even an instant, that what they did was acceptable.
Where do you stop singing the praises of state-funded research? How many people did ARPANET help kill? If we owe the modern Internet to all the military programs between 1960 and 199x or so and you recognize this as good; what's the difference between that and the various Nazi programs. Killing is killing, isn't it?
Well, virtually all state-funded research is motivated by war. War means killing people. Sometimes by the millions. Certainly by the thousands. And, in that regard --in terms of the mass killings-- it is no different from genocide.
How about nuclear power? A great result of state-funded research? Killed millions.
So, in embracing your belief system, do we ever fault governments or do we always look at the rosy side of state-funded research and ignore the ugly parts. As I asked before, how many people did ARPANET help kill? Is that ever a consideration? I am not sure Compuserve and other civilian BBS's helped kill nearly as many people --if any-- as the various means of communication resulting from state-funded research.
When I was younger the realities of war never really hit my radar. As I got older it really started to turn my stomach. And that's why I developed this idea that we should limit our government to throwing fancy dinners for visiting dignitaries and pull ALL non essential funding from their hands. All they do is kill people, one way or the other. The research would be done far better, cheaper, faster and with less violent purposes in the private sector.
I prefer capitalism and profit-driven entrepreneurship than war-driven state-sponsored research who's aim is to kill mil...
The risk of going to the moon before anyone else is such a risk (political motivations aside).
Stating that the government can be an effective tool for mitigating risks associated with research is not an endorsement of everything the government does. This is not an endorsement of everything governments have done in the past. This isn't even an endorsement of government at all in its current form.
It is a statement of what our government ought to be doing more of. It is a statement that our current system has disproportionately distributed rewards -- aren't we supposed to reward those who create the most value?
As far as the distribution of rewards. The market decides that. Obviously the market --the average consumer-- does not think government is producing enough value or they would be flush with cash. If government produced real value we would be throwing money at them, me included.
With regards to the question of risky or very, very long term research.
Do we really believe government is good at this at all? I don't really see it that way. If you compare the evolution of technologies in private hands vs. that of publicly funded programs, what are the results?
Perhaps the best comparison is to compare efforts in the old Soviet Union with efforts in similar industries in the US. For all their might, the Soviets couldn't make a car worth a damn. During the same period in the US a multitude of private companies produced design after design and evolved solutions that were ages better than anything coming out of the Soviets.
Even Igor Sikorsky ultimately had to emigrate to the US in order to have his helicopter designs grow out of private efforts and evolve as they have. Little known fact: Composer Sergei Rachmaninov funded Sikorsky to the tune of $5,000 to help him launch his company.
Now, of course, as any good entrepreneur would do, you look for where you can sell your products. If government wants to buy you are not going to say "no". And, if government wants to throw more money at you to build other products for them you are going to follow suit. A lot had to happen before government could shovel money at Sikorsky. Other similar stories abound.
Then there's the question of whether or not government is actually equipped to truly make long reaching decision. Few decisions are really made with a clear view of what the future outcome might be. Why did we go to the moon? It was part of an arms race with the Soviets. Not much more than that. Again, war. I have a very fundamental problem with this idea of doing all of these things and spending all of this money to be better at war-making. It really stinks.
Was the lunar program truly worth the investment? Could we have produced similar or better results through other programs?
I am watching companies like SpaceX with great interest. The drive, focus and priorities private enterprise has, when combined with people hell-bent to make it happen, cannot be paralleled by any organization assembled by government. The mindset is massively different.
We could point at side benefits of technologies like GPS. Great stuff, right? Again, what was the motivator? Military. War. More efficient killing. Yuk! The civilian use of GPS was never a part of the program or the driving motivators.
And so, nearly all "good" technology that has come out of any government effort is almost always linked to military needs. If there are no military needs government either does not do it or they fail miserably.
This is the aspect of the whole pro-government, pro-public sector, pro-state-funded mentality I am not getting. You can't point at ARPANET as a state-funded research success without pointing at the thousand or millions (who knows) of people it was surely responsible for helping kill. One goes with the other. There is not dividing line. The state did not initiate these programs to help milk cows or to help us buy books online. They launched and funded these programs to create better killing systems for the wars they need to conduct.
I know I am harping on the military connection. I am eager to have someone provide me with a list of state-funded technologies that DO NOT have their genesis in a fundamental military...
In my biased opinion I'd suggest you study western and northern European democracies. The government provides essential services (decentralized up to the district level) like education, water, streets, police, health care, social security for it's citizens.
I'd rather have clean water and unbiased police and justice and free education. Every private company needs to maximize their own profit. The government does not need to do this. They can subsidize important but nonprofitable projects. This can be and has been made efficient.
There is no interest in a private prison company to reduce crime. There is also not much reason for a private rail company to invest in infrastructure that not profitable. But as a citizen I have an interest to use a efficient train.
It's not black and white. Private sector is very good at a lot of things. But there are certain other things that are natural monopolies or important for the functioning of the society that in my opinion can be best served by an efficient government.
The private sector and capitalism do not also not always work in your interest - Adam Curtis from the BBC (also government :) did a great documentation about certain effects of free market radicalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set
I wonder if herein lies the fundamental difference. I would never put it the way you have.
The people form the government and pay them to administer infrastructure and services for them. That is massively different than the "government does for it's people" view. One is almost a royals-and-subjects view while the other says, well, government of the people, by the people and for the people.
In my model we hire the government to serve us. They are nothing more than our employees.
The other data point I have is that as a youngster my family spent quite a number of years in Argentina. Monkeys would govern that country better than nearly any administration they have had to endure. I have followed their politics on and off over the years. To this day they continue to be raped and pillaged by their government. The only way you can characterize them is thugs, thieves and gangsters. It is quite possible that seeing some of the things I saw there planted the seeds for not seeing government as part of the solution as an adult. I mean, look at Cyprus.
It's quite easy to broaden ones perspective, if that's actually the goal.
A private rail company might decide to lay down unprofitable track to massively grow demand and habitual preference for rail travel. Or, it might stick to more profitable tracks and in exchange not have to pass on the costs of disparate routes to the customers in the high-density areas.
I was to answer him, but I could not believe he's doing this to listen,as he claim. I also would not hold my anger.
Pointing out that the vast majority of the technology stemming from state-funded research came from military programs is nothing less than the truth.
I'll not enter in a discussion with you here and now, politically I'm very pragmatic, although I'm pretty Conservative (As a Tory used to be some years ago). This post brought some memories (of my friend) which are uncomfortable in certain situations and with the due respect to my grandparents I'll also pass this one.
So what is your background?
Is that what you needed to know?
Researchers in the private sector publish a healthy amount of papers in peer-reviewed journals. The elephant in the room is drug design. Many of the drugs on the market today were indeed developed and funded by pharmaceutical companies; yes, pharma companies do occasionally push bullshit products. But imatinib works. It's a trillion-dollar industry for a reason.
As an aside, academia probably shouldn't be lumped under the banner of "state" -- the independence of academia helps it succeed.
>This is a problem for today's generation of enthusiastic free-market proponents. Who is going to pay for the next generation of innovation?
Take a deep breath. The bottom line is this: scientific research is cheap.
The US spends a paltry portion of its budget on research. Hell, I think they even spend more on education. Funny, right? So in the context of the great economic circus, publically funding scientific research affects the "freeness" of the market about as much as publically funding, say, the police. Even Ron Paul wasn't looking to make very large cuts to research.
And that's another reason you should vote for whoever is going to increase my salary: it won't hardly cost you anything.
Quantum computing is fucking cool. Very intellectually challenging stuff. Props for that.
I agree on public funding for basic research. Politicians who say "these guys aren't earning their keep" are idiots, and we're worse (as a populace) for not firing these assholes. The mechanism is right there, it's unambiguously legal. Let's fucking use it. Anyway, how is a PhD who makes $85,000 per year while advancing the state of science, who is giving all the work away for the public good, not earning her keep? It makes no damn sense.
Researchers in the private sector publish a healthy amount of papers in peer-reviewed journals. The elephant in the room is drug design. Many of the drugs on the market today were indeed developed and funded by pharmaceutical companies; yes, pharma companies do occasionally push bullshit products. But imatinib works. It's a trillion-dollar industry for a reason.
My issue with the drug industry is that the profit motive seems to be generating 20 variations on the same theme (e.g. statins) and underfunding a lot of greater advancements.
The US spends a paltry portion of its budget on research
Damn right. It's pathetic. We spend more on this "war on terror" in one year than on cancer research in 50. Yet cancer kills orders of magnitude more people than terrorism.
No, what this really underscores is a fundamental change in thinking for equality that our civilizations seeks since centuries: taking people seriously, no matter of gender, race or in this case age. Many people have good reason to be jealous, being jealous this was not possible when they/we were so young.
When I was that age I hated the fact that only old people would be taken seriously when it comes to business. We can be happy this is possible and as a further sign that age discrimination is going to be eradicated. Besides, this is about discrimination of young people but old people are discriminated against too.
Military research may have made done early development on networking protocols, but it was capitalism and the free market principals that took if from "something that could have potential" to the "humanities greatest creation."
Saying that government created the internet would be like giving a government credit for creating cars because while making new weapons, they accidentally made wheel.
Military research may have made done early development on networking protocols, but it was capitalism and the free market principals that took if from "something that could have potential" to the "humanities greatest creation."
Saying that government created the internet would be like giving a government credit for creating cars because while making new weapons, they accidentally made wheel.